Seven days with the Chernobyler Maggid

The parsha opens with Hashem appearing "to him." The verse never says who. Rabbi Menachem Nachum reads that on purpose: "him" is you. Hashem appears to every Jew, every day, in a passing thought: I should be better than this. He calls these hirhurei teshuvah, thoughts of teshuvah (turning back to Hashem). In the paragraph before, he says even the worst person gets them every single day.

Then he reads the rest of the verse, step by step, as what to do with that thought:

The Midrash says "the Avot are the chariot" of Hashem. The Me'or Einayim explains what that means with a horse and rider. A good horse does not decide where to go. It goes where the rider steers. The Avot were like that: they went only where Hashem wanted. That is the goal of the person who "runs toward the three men." He wants to be steered by Hashem, not by his yetzer hara (the pull inside us toward what is wrong).

The Gemara (Yoma 28b) says Avraham kept the whole Torah, hundreds of years before Sinai. How could he know it? The Me'or Einayim answers with an idea from Kabbalah. The Torah comes from Chochmah, wisdom. Chochmah is pictured as a single point, like a seed that holds a whole tree. In Hashem's four-letter name it is the first letter, the yud, which is barely more than a dot.

At Sinai, he says, Hashem first said the whole Torah in one utterance, as it exists in that single point. Nobody could take that in. So the people asked Moshe to speak to them instead. The Torah then came down in steps: from the point of Chochmah, to Binah (understanding, working the idea out), to a voice that people could actually hear.

Avraham was different. He was connected to the point itself, so he grasped the whole Torah from its source. The Me'or Einayim adds that this is why the verse says "Hashem appeared to him" without his name: Avraham was attached to something so hidden that it has no name.

Then he makes a big claim about history. The Torah says the heavens and earth were created b'hibaram, and the Midrash reads the same letters as b'Avraham: in Avraham's merit. Before him the world was tohu, chaos: the generation of the Flood and the generation of the Tower of Babel. A teaching quoted in the Gemara (Avodah Zarah 9a) says the world has two thousand years of chaos, then two thousand years of Torah, and it counts the years of Torah from Avraham's time.

He ends with one opinion in the Gemara (Bava Batra 16b): "Avraham had a daughter, and Bakol was her name." (Other Sages there read the verse differently.) The Me'or Einayim reads bakol as "in everything":

Avraham is three days after his brit milah. Hashem is appearing to him. Then three travelers show up, and Avraham asks Hashem to wait while he runs to take care of them. From this the Gemara learns:

The Me'or Einayim asks a sharp question. Hashem fills the whole world (Yeshayahu 6:3). How can Avraham ask Him not to "pass away," as if Hashem would not be where the guests are? And another: maybe welcoming guests is not really greater than the Shechinah. Maybe the Shechinah is there too, in the mitzvah, so Avraham gets both.

To answer, he explains what a mitzvah is. The word mitzvah is related to tzavta, togetherness. A mitzvah has a body (the action) and a soul (the closeness to Hashem and the longing for Him inside the action). That is why the Mishnah says "the reward of a mitzvah is the mitzvah": the real reward is that closeness itself.

So what was Avraham asking for?

Avraham was not afraid Hashem would leave the room. Hashem is everywhere. He was afraid that he would lose the connection when he switched tasks. He uses this to explain Rabbi Elazar's words in the Gemara. Among people, a lesser person cannot tell a greater one "wait for me," because wherever the greater one goes, he is no longer here. Hashem is everywhere, so Avraham could ask Him: stay with me there too.

And here is the proof that the mitzvah itself is great. Avraham walked away from something certain, a direct meeting with Hashem, for something uncertain: he had to pray to keep the connection. And the guests looked to Avraham like Arab nomads (Bava Metzia 86b), not holy men. So the mitzvah must be very great on its own. Avraham only asked to do it completely.

Mamre was an Amorite, one of the nations of Canaan. The Torah calls him and his brothers Avram's allies (Bereishit 14:13). Rashi, from the Midrash, says Mamre advised Avraham about his brit milah. The Me'or Einayim finds two problems.

The Torah forbids making a pact with the nations of Canaan (Devarim 7:2), and Avraham kept the whole Torah. And why would Avraham, of all people, need advice about a mitzvah? His answer: ba'alei brit Avram means they were the cause of Avraham's brit. Living among the nations of Canaan, Avraham saw that his children could inherit the land only through the brit milah. That situation was the "advice."

Later in the chapter he goes further. The Sages say Avraham sits at the entrance of Gehinnom (where souls are punished and cleansed after death) and does not let his circumcised children go down into it (Bereishit Rabbah 48:8), and that he brings up those who are there (Eruvin 19a). Avraham's whole life was about bringing people close, like "the souls they made in Charan" (Bereishit 12:5), which Onkelos (the Aramaic translation of the Torah) renders as the people they brought to the Torah.

So he reads the verse again with wordplay. Elonei (oaks) recalls "the oaks of Bashan" (Yeshayahu 2:13), which he takes to mean wicked people. Mamre sounds like himru, "they rebelled." "Hashem appeared to him in the oaks of Mamre" means: even there, among people who rebel against Hashem, Avraham saw Hashem, and saw a chance to lift them up. "Sitting at the opening of the tent in the heat of the day" becomes Avraham sitting at the entrance of Gehinnom, "the day that comes, burning like an oven" (Malachi 3:19). He adds a limit: this works for those who kept the brit milah, the sign that they belong to Avraham.

A little later he adds a verse for the person who brings someone back. Hashem tells Yirmiyahu: "If you bring out the precious from the worthless, you will be like My mouth" (Yirmiyahu 15:19). Finding the good in a person who has fallen, and drawing it out, is a godly act.

This teaching runs through today and tomorrow. It opens with a verse: "Go, children, listen to me; I will teach you the fear of Hashem" (Tehillim 34:12). To explain it, the Me'or Einayim brings a law from the Gemara (Kiddushin 49b), in the words he quotes: a man betroths a woman "on condition that I am a tzaddik," a righteous person, "and he was found to be wicked." The betrothal is valid. Why? "Maybe he had a thought of teshuvah in his mind." (Our printed Gemara says "even if he is completely wicked." His reading below builds on the wording he quotes.)

But that creates a problem. The Sages speak of a heavenly voice that calls out every day, "Return, children." He adds that every soul hears it, even if the person does not. Everyone has thoughts of teshuvah every day. So if one thought makes you a tzaddik, there are no wicked people at all!

His answer: a thought of teshuvah is a candle. For a person who has sunk deep, the darkness is so thick that the candle goes out right away. "The candle of the wicked goes out" (Mishlei 13:9). That person first has to break through the darkness. In his words, through fasts and hard self-discipline. Only then can teshuvah take hold.

But for a different kind of person, one thought is enough:

Because holiness already lives inside him, the light of that one thought brings him right back to where he was. That, he says, is the Gemara's case: a man who is good, who "was found wicked" in one thing. He uses this to explain another Gemara (Rosh Hashanah 16b): on Rosh Hashanah the completely righteous are written "immediately" for life. He reads it as: they are written into the book of the righteous for the whole year, so that if they slip, one thought will fix it immediately.

And the person who has fallen far is not abandoned. "All your children are taught by Hashem" (Yeshayahu 54:13). Hashem teaches every person how to come back, and His kingship reaches even the lowest places:

He is talking about wicked people who slander the tzaddik, which cuts them off from him so that he cannot lift them up. But his point about speech applies to everyone. When a person dirties his mouth with lies, gossip, informing on people and lashon hara (speaking badly about others), the door is blocked. Holiness cannot get in. And then something else happens: he starts to see people differently.

Nobody is perfect. "There is no righteous man on earth who does good and never sins" (Kohelet 7:20), and he reads yechta, sins, as "lacks something." So every good person has some small flaw. The person with a dirty mouth spots exactly that flaw, talks about it again and again, and even adds lies. The flaw he sees in others is a picture of himself.

Then he reads Tehillim 34 as a plan. "To see good" means to see the good that is in every place. "Guard your tongue" comes first, because that is what makes it possible. "Turn from evil and do good": if you slipped, fix it with real regret. "Seek peace": shalom comes from shleimut, wholeness. Chase Hashem's wholeness, so that His kingship spreads into everything.

He ties it back to the opening verse of the parsha. "He was sitting at the opening of the tent": here the one sitting at the opening is the yetzer hara, and the opening is the mouth. When speech is impure, holiness has no way in.

In a Sefer Torah, the word eilav, "to him," has dots over three letters: א־י־ו, which spell ayo, "where is he?" The Gemara (Bava Metzia 87a) says this teaches derech eretz, good manners: a guest should ask his host about the hostess. Rashi adds that the angels also asked Sarah, "Where is Avraham?" to teach that you ask a husband about his wife and a wife about her husband.

The Me'or Einayim points out that the verse does not show them asking Sarah anything. So what did the dots mean?

He uses two Kabbalah terms: the hidden world and the revealed world (in Aramaic, alma d'itkasya and alma d'itgalya). He links the husband to the hidden world and the wife to the revealed world. What is inside a person, his deeds and his true level, good or bad, becomes visible through his wife.

And the angels needed this. The Gemara (Sanhedrin 93a, Rabbi Yochanan) says the righteous are greater than the ministering angels. He concludes that angels cannot grasp a great tzaddik's level directly. They could not see Avraham's inner world. They could see Sarah, and through her, understand "where" Avraham was: how high he stood. That is the hidden meaning of the dots: ayo, where is he?